Introducing Ballpark Projects
How the idea for Ballpark’s newest feature came from the needs of our own growing business.
After five months of researching, planning, designing and coding, yesterday we launched what I think is going to become an invaluable tool for your business. It’s Ballpark’s biggest new feature in years: Projects.
Projects is our first major step towards turning Ballpark into something that will make you better at running your business, whether you’re running an agency or freelancing.
We’ve covered the feature details on the Ballpark blog, so let me take you through how we got here from my perspective as the owner of a consulting agency.
Team Work
When the entire Simple Focus team (there are 15 of us) started using Ballpark on a daily basis, I realized its time tracking feature needed major help if it was going to be useful to my growing business.
Better reporting on time entries would make it easier for me to keep my finger on the pulse of my business. And since we track more than 1,000 billable hours each month, it would also also streamline our process for managing budgets and sending invoices based on time entries.
“I bought Ballpark because I want to help people run their businesses better, and I’m in this for the long haul.”
Patrick, Ballpark’s product manager (and the guy who sends invoices for Simple Focus), started to form some ideas about how to improve this process, but he was afraid to undertake such a dramatic overhaul of Ballpark so soon after we bought it. He was anticipating that we’d need to focus our team’s time on Simple Focus’ consulting clients because that’s business that gets us paid now. Investing in Ballpark would get us paid, but it would be much further down the road.
So, Patrick and the team tried a lot of tweaks to our internal processes over the last five months to make it easier to send invoices based on time entries without changing Ballpark. They hacked the way Ballpark uses Clients and Companies, and they reorganized internal processes around the software. But, it still took too much time and energy and was keeping our focus off of our work.
Ultimately, they decided the best way to organize this would be to create a new feature called Projects inside of Ballpark that would mimic the way our business, and many others in the creative industry, operate. This way, the software would be designed around us, rather than us designing our business around the software.
Patrick was a little hesitant to suggest such a large investment, but he sat me down and explained why this new feature was necessary for Ballpark and for Simple Focus’ operations.
I said, “Okay, do that then. I trust you.”
As a business owner, it’s not always easy to invest your own money in things that pay out over the long-term because sometimes, you just need to worry about your current situation. We also own and manage a cash flow management app called Pulse, and business hasn’t always been easy, so take my word for it when I say cash flow is always top-of-mind.
At the same time, though, I bought Ballpark because I want to help people run their businesses better, and I’m in this for the long haul.
Take A Look
Until yesterday, Ballpark didn’t have a view for setting a budget or grouping time entries under a single project. Today, that changed. Suddenly, Ballpark is way more valuable to agencies and freelancers alike.
We’ve been using the new version internally for a while now, and I love how I can log in and see how our projects are going with a quick glance.
Give It A Try
I’m excited about Projects, but we’re not going to stop there. By working on Ballpark, we get to work on a product that helps us and other businesses. As the team here continues to make it better, I’m excited to see how many other agencies just like ours start to adopt it.
If you don’t use Ballpark, check it out. The first month’s on me.
